You Are Dumb, which is not a blog, posts new columns when it can manage to in these troubled Trumpian times. It is also a Twitter feed, @youaredumb, with content in a similar vein but much shorter. For a take on what a blog by me would be like, check out OLDNERD.

August 23rd

I’ve said before that Trump’s primary motivation is to get through whatever sentence he’s in the middle of. That when he says things, and you wonder “what do those things mean”, what they mean is, “I’m in the middle of the sentence, or an answer to a question, and he wants to get to the end of it, and that’s what all the other words are for.

And this is still accurate, but I’ve come to realize it’s also a bit simplistic. It’s a subset of his true motivation, and that is to Get Away With It.

What the It is he’s getting away with is largely situational and varies wildly in scale. For example, when he’s being interviewed, or answering questions, or delivering a speech, he wants to get away with being a functional illiterate in charge of the free world, or at least the parts of the free world not being run by people he’s alienated.

As this week showed us, though, he also desperately wants to get away with just being president. All of his attacks on people, institutions, everything? They’re not part of any kind of ideology. They’re just things that might keep him from getting away with being president. Obviously, Michael Cohen pleading guilty to paying off Trump’s mistresses, at Trump’s direction, to keep people from finding out about Trump’s mistresses before the election, is a huge obstacle to him getting away with it.

That’s why he went on Fox and Friends to say this. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

”It's called flipping and it almost ought to be illegal, I know all about flipping, 30, 40 years I have been watching flippers.”

You would, of course, be forgiven if you though that by “watching flippers” he meant trips to Sea World and jerking off to underage female gymnasts. But remember, Donald Trump is a New York real-estate mogul, which makes him both as Mob-adjacent as you want him to be and less Mob -adjacent than he wants to be, deep in his heart. So he’s seen how law enforcement uses the testimony of underlings to take down bigger fish, and he doesn’t fucking like it, because he wants to be a big fish. Except without all the swimming. Smacks of exercise. Flipping keeps him from getting away with it, and he needs to get away with it.

And can you blame him? His entire life has been him getting away with it. It’s all he’s ever known. What was the money shot of the Access Hollywood tape? ”And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” Take a good long look at how much of that sentence is about the sexual aspect and how much of it is getting away with it. And then the tape came out, and he GOT AWAY WITH THAT TOO.

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Of course you can blame him for it. That question was rhetorical. And ridiculous. It was rhetorculous. You can blame him, and you can enjoy every legal setback that brings him closer to not getting away with it, and you can vote in November to cut back on the number of Republicans in Congress this November, since right now, they all think that their ticket to getting away with their own shit is helping Trump get away with his

And maybe, if we’re lucky, for the first (or third, if you count the two divorces) time in his life, he won’t get away with it.